skullgiver , 21 hours ago

It’s not really planned obsolescence, they changed the way their drivers work with the 16xx/20xx series. Up till the 10xx series, they did a lot of algorithms and processing in the software. Then they switched to doing most of that on the GPU in the form of firmware. The 10 series GPUs can’t do that.

Like most hardware vendors, Nvidia doesn’t want (and probably isn’t allowed to) publish all of their special sauce source code. They can open source the driver and load a binary blob like, most hardware does, but only on the newer cards.

The older cards will have to keep the special sauce in software on the CPU, so those devices will need to stick to the proprietary driver.